Spare the rod

Spoil the child?

On a spring day, Susan Lawrence was flipping through a magazine, Home School Digest, when she came across an advertisement that took her breath away. In it, ”The Rod,” a $5 flexible whipping stick, was described as the ”ideal tool for child training.”

”Spoons are for cooking, belts are for holding up pants, hands are for loving, and rods are for chastening,” read the advertisement she saw nearly two years ago for the 22-inch nylon rod. It also cited a biblical passage, which instructs parents not to spare the ”rod of correction.”

Lawrence has been gathering petitions and trying to get the Consumer Products Safety Comission to ban “The Rod” (which is not currently being manufactured). The CPSC has decline thus far, finding “no basis for determining that the product constitutes a substantial product hazard.”

I’m conflicted, as I think many people are, over corporal punishment. Certainly, when abused, it’s a bad thing. But are there any circumstances when it’s possible to inflict some sort of pain-based punishment, physical chastisement, on a child?

After all, I grew up getting both swatted on the butt (bare or otherwise), as well as (if things escalated) a paddling with a wooden spoon or a couple of licks with a hair brush. I don’t feel particularly traumatized, nor did I cease to trust my parents because of it, nor become more aggressive and violent, nor did any permanent physical injury ensue.

I’ve not swatted Katherine’s behind, and I don’t think, personally, I’d use a secondary object other than my hand if I did. I have used finger flicks to the hands or ears to drive home a point when mere words were proving not enough; not lightly and not often, but enough, probably, that I’d get hauled before a judge in Germany or Sweden, where all corporal punishment is forbidden. I’d never use “the Rod,” and I’d probably feel uneasy about someone who did — but I don’t agree (nor am I asked to) with every child-rearing decision those around me make, and I’m not willing to blanket say that a timely thwack to the butt with something like that wouldn’t be proper and of in some cases.

It does make me wonder, though: if it’s an unquestionable evil to physically discipline a child, why is it okay to emotionally/verbally discipline them. After all, we can all call to mind abusive use of words and shouting that we’ve seen (or endured); when will it become socially (or legally) unacceptable to use reproachful language with kids (which may make them, to follow the argument, less trusting of their parents, more prone to be verbally abusive, and possibly traumatized emotionally)? Or to rob them of their freedom through “time outs,” which, when I was a lad, was called “sitting it the corner” (and which, again, one would expect to hinder trust, promote bondage, and cause any number of other emotional or mental injuries)?

Is the only conclusion we can reach that punishment, of any sort, is wrong, and we should seek to reward/bribe kids into good behavior? Or am I being too judgmental by labeling one behavior “good” over another?

What I find personally irksome about the article is how it uses (to punch up the story, I suspect) religion as the key argument here, with folks arguing the Bible verse about spare the rod/spoil the child, and others arguing that the Golden Rule should apply. Folks will clearly find in Scripture what they want to find (and I suspect that folks on both sides of the argument would disapprove of or not wish to live with other nearby passages that could be thrown their way). I seriously doubt, though, that many folks who use corporal punishment do so because Scripture tells them to; at most, it gives them permission to do what they feel is needful. Religious conviction, no matter how trendy a journalistic subject at the most (especially if it can be used to point to divides between civilized folks in Virginia and thuggish hicks in Oklahoma) is not what’s at stake here, and asking what Scripture shows that corporal punishment is right or wrong seems beside the point.

The questions, instead, should be, What are the costs and the benefits? Does it work? And does it cause harm out of proportion to its effectiveness? And I don’t want to hear about the extreme cases — one can favor, or at least allow, corporal punishment without sanctioning beating a kid bloody, just as one can suggest robbing a misbehaving child of dessert without sanctioning locking them up in a closet and starving them for a few days, or one can permit telling a kid they’ve done something wrong without sanctioning someone shouting that they’re worthless and unloved.

(via J-Walk)